Anxiety Tests

“The Hurt Locker” and “Food, Inc.”

Jeremy Renner in Kathryn Bigelow’s movie about a bomb-disposal squad in Iraq.

Illustration by Frank Stockton

The Iraq war has been dramatized on film many times, and those films have been ignored just as many times by theatre audiences. But Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker” is the most skillful and emotionally involving picture yet made about the conflict. The film, from a script by Mark Boal, has a new subject: the heroism of the men who defuse improvised explosive devices, sloppily made but lethal bombs planted under a bag or a pile of garbage or just beneath the dirt of a Baghdad street. Bigelow stages one prolonged and sinister shoot-out in the desert, but the movie couldn’t be called a combat film, nor is it political, except by implication—a mutual distrust between American occupiers and Iraqi citizens is there in every scene. The specialized nature of the subject is part of what makes it so powerful, and perhaps American audiences worn out by the mixed emotions of frustration and repugnance inspired by the war can enjoy this film without ambivalence or guilt. “The Hurt Locker” narrows the war to the existential confrontation of man and deadly threat.

Over and over, Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner), following a tip-off, walks to a bomb site in a heavy protective suit and tries to figure out how to pull apart clumsily tangled wires and flimsy triggering devices. We’ve seen James’s predecessor die on the job: a man watching him from a nearby store detonated a bomb with a cell phone. As James goes in, slowly, under a hot sun, treading like a spaceman through trash-filled streets, people gather in doorways or look out windows. Which of them is hostile, which friendly, which merely curious? The two other members of James’s team, the frightened young Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) and the wary, experienced Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), cover James, screaming at anyone who moves. The two men feel entirely vulnerable; they both admire and detest James, who pulls them into situations they would rather leave to someone else.

In the past, Kathryn Bigelow, now fifty-seven, has outdone the macho movie boys at their own game. In her “Blue Steel” (1989), as Jamie Lee Curtis, playing a cop, geared up for a day’s work, Bigelow focussed on her revolver, her leather holster, and her shoes, in gleaming closeup. The sequence hovered somewhere between fetish and parody. Bigelow went into the ocean with Patrick Swayze and Keanu Reeves in the surfer-crime movie “Point Break” (1991), and brought off scenes of languorously slo-mo destruction in the cultish sci-fi crime movie “Strange Days” (1995). By the mid-nineties, I had her figured as a violence junkie with a strong tendency to stylize everything into stunning images that didn’t always mean much. As a filmmaker, Bigelow is still obsessed with violence, but she’s become a master at staging it. In “The Hurt Locker,” there are no wasted shots or merely beautiful images. As Eldridge and Sanborn jerk their guns this way and that at a bomb scene, Bigelow, working with the great cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, jerks the camera around, too. She wants us to be there, to feel the danger, the mystery.

This kind of immediacy is commonplace in action filmmaking, but, unlike so many directors today, who jam together crashes, explosions, and people sailing through the air in nonsensical montages of fantasy movement, Bigelow keeps the space tight and coherent. No matter how many times she cuts away, you know exactly where James is in relation to a bomb—whether he’s in the kill zone or far enough away to be safe. (You can’t break up the integrity of space when space is the subject of your movie.) And Bigelow prolongs the moment, stretching out our anxiety almost to the point at which it becomes pain. “The Hurt Locker” is quite a feat: in this period of antic fragmentation, Bigelow has restored the wholeness of time and space as essentials for action. Occasionally, a plaintive reader writes me a note after I’ve panned some violent fantasy movie and says something like “Some of us like explosions. Ease up.” Well, I like these explosions, because I believe in them. Realism has its thrills, too.

The insistence on plainness, the absence of stylization, carries over to the performances as well. Jeremy Renner has played the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer and many minor roles in action movies. He has a round face, with a beautiful smile that he mostly keeps hidden, and a strong but unglamorous body. Bigelow’s idea in casting him, I think, was to make her star a competent but physically ordinary American serviceman whose greatest gifts are within. William James, it turns out, is implacably heroic. He never steps away from danger. You might say that he’s drawn to it and needs it, but he never makes a fuss about what he’s doing. His charisma consists of having no obvious charisma except phenomenal concentration and guts. And since he knows, handling bombs, when to be cautious and when not to be, he can be hair-raisingly casual, tossing aside a disabled device as if it were an empty juice carton. At one point, he shucks his headset, too, and Sanborn, who needs to stay in touch with what James is doing, is so enraged that he slugs him. In the nineteen-fifties, Aldo Ray played men like William James—war lovers, completely at home on the battlefield but hapless in the normal relations of life. (When James and his partners relax and get drunk, the only way they can show their affection is to punch one another in the stomach.) But Ray’s military men were unreachable, stone-cold killers, while James has strong emotions, which he keeps pent up.

Bigelow and Mark Boal (the journalist who developed the real-life material that served as the basis of Paul Haggis’s “In the Valley of Elah”) don’t always let us know exactly what’s going on. As the soldiers swing into action, the filmmakers want a sense of strangeness and disorientation, a craziness that’s on the verge of taking over the moment. As James is walking toward a bomb, an Iraqi drives into the scene in a taxi and won’t obey commands to go back. What is he up to? Another man, strapped with explosives, changes his mind about suicide and tearfully begs James to rescue him. Is he a lure? The anguish of uncertainty is part of the men’s daily life, and James himself, so sure in his odd profession, gets into a serious mixup over a friendly Iraqi boy who he thinks has been murdered by insurgents. Suddenly, he loses his bearings and charges around Baghdad like a madman. “The Hurt Locker” is a small classic of tension, bravery, and fear, which will be studied twenty years from now when people want to understand something of what happened to American soldiers in Iraq. If there are moviegoers who are exhausted by the current fashion for relentless fantasy violence, this is the convincingly blunt and forceful movie for them.

Those of us who avoid junk food, with many sighs of relief and self-approval, may still be eating junk a good deal of the time. This enraging fact, which will not surprise anyone who has read such muckraking books as Eric Schlosser’s “Fast Food Nation” (2001) and Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” (2006), is one of the discomforting meanings of the powerful new documentary “Food, Inc.,” an angry blast of disgust aimed at the American food industry. The introduction of corn as a cheap (heavily subsidized) universal feed, for chickens, for cows, even for fish, not to mention the corn products seeping into candy, soft drinks, cheese, and everything else but (if we’re lucky) capers and olives, has, in the past thirty years or so, made that particular package of starch nearly inescapable. Unless we search out, at considerable expense, organic free-range poultry and grass-fed meat, we’re eating corn when we eat a chicken or a steak dinner. We’re eating corn when we drink a Coke. The seemingly vast array of foods in a typical supermarket is not so varied as we might think; much of it is produced or controlled by a few enormous food companies that have operated without serious government regulation in recent years. We didn’t always eat as badly as we do now.

The director of “Food, Inc.,” Robert Kenner, has many outrageous things to tell us about industrial food, but the picture is perhaps most upsetting when we get a glimpse (largely from footage shot surreptitiously by workers) of the way poultry and livestock are raised. Chickens are mainly kept in long, dark, stifling sheds, where they stand in their own waste, and are fatted with corn to the slaughter point in a mere forty-nine days. Beef cattle are jammed together in enormous pens, many of them sick from feed that violates a digestive system built for grass. Their illness can become our illness. Both Schlosser and Pollan—measured, factual, and devastating—appear in the film, laying out the broad outlines of the food system, and we see some of its victims, most memorably a poor Latino family that admits, with resigned sorrow, that it can afford to fill up on fast-food burgers but not on fresh vegetables. For many of this movie’s likely viewers, the sting built into “Food, Inc.” is the realization that, without unending effort, they are not all that much freer in their choices than that hard-pressed family. ♦

David Denby has been a staff writer and film critic at The New Yorker since 1998.